This Column was supposed to be a "fun" one, cause I feel like the last one I wrote was a bit of a drag to read. WELL GUESS WHAT! It's not going to be. I'm going to open up a vent and blow out all sorts of pressure (insert fart joke here) that's been building in me for the past 7 years about my incurable autoimmune disease.

If you'd like to skip the upcoming dreck and refuse, you can skip ahead to the Top 5 which I do hope you'll find delightful.

I'm going to write about what it's like to have a
progressive,
incurable,
painful,
disabling,
autoimmune disease.

I'll be using works like "pain" and "general suckiness". So calibrate yourself. You've been warned. I might insert jokey jokes for the purposes of sanity here and there - but there's really a ton pent up processing I have that I'd like to vomit all over this Column.

311 is Melissa's favorite number because she likes (or liked?) the band "311". #FunFactRightOutTheGate #MisplacedHashtags

It's rare that you know you're making a mistake while you're making it.

Often times it takes years to realize you probably shouldn't have done X or Y. You make a choice and take an action, see the consequence and immediately write it off as the only possible eventuality that could have occurred. You're a rational person. You made the choice. So it had to be a rational choice, right?

You aren't perfect. You learn that growing up, time and time again. You look back at the choice you made and see where the path could have diverted. You could have gotten from there to here with less pain. You could have gotten to some other place that you'd rather be.

It happens as you get older.First, you look back at yourself in elementary school or middle school and think "WHY!?&…

I changed the layout to the Column. This is how it looks now. I guess that's all there is to say about that.

In 18 days the Life Tracker will turn 4 years old. My earliest data are dated 04/22/2013. That doesn't mean I'll have 4x365+1forleapyears = 1461 day's worth of data, unfortunately. It used to be that if I missed a single day, I had to nuke the entire week's data. That happened something like 35 times during those 4 years, so my extensive journal only has just shy of 1200 days in it. Regardless - it's pretty INSERTWORDHERE* that I'm still doing this after so long.